East London loft

Alyssa Warren will never forget the day it dawned on her she may have bitten off more than she could chew with the refurbishment of this Shoreditch loft. 'Our first builder had walked out, after ripping out the kitchen and bathroom, and I'd just interviewed a builder who laughed when he saw we were three floors up without a lift,' she recalls.

'I called my husband, Santiago, and asked him to come over and film me bawling, so that he could play the film to me if I ever decided to renovate again!' Of course, a year on, Alyssa has forgotten much of the pain that went into transforming this gloomy loft into the inspirational space the couple and their five-year-old son, Dámaso, now share. Take a tour around their London loft - proof that all their hard work paid off.

Both Alyssa and Santiago are creative types – she's a printmaker producing one-of-a-kind works of art called monotypes, while he heads up European business development of a design and innovation consultancy – so their home was unlikely to be run-of-the-mill.

The couple also had a secret weapon: Alyssa's mother, Jan Sue Warren, is an interior designer, and was willing to jet over from the States for weeks at a time to help Alyssa project manage the builders and turn the naff Nineties space into a cool loft that would suit family life.

Alyssa and Jan Sue can be commissioned at alyssa.warren.studio@gmail.com. To view Alyssa's monotypes, see alyssa-warren.com.

See room-by-room pictures of Alyssa and Santiago's cool East London loft